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Correct me if I’m wrong… but could there be an election somewhere on the horizon?
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Be honest, you’d think that was weird, wouldn’t you? A touch unhinged perhaps.
If you were to approach this man, you might do so carefully. And then you might say: ‘Man, why not let the dog catch the stick? Why not put the lead on the dog? Man – why do all that stuff yourself when you’ve got a dog? That’s kind of what dogs are for.’
It’s a peculiar brand of thinking that gets a man acting that way. But it’s a kind of logic that was displayed fairly prominently in the States last week during the debate on increasing the retirement age to 67 as politicians squirmed and wriggled, as politicians will do when the Right Thing to do is also the Hard Thing to do, and when there is an Election coming.
There are, after all, Good Ways of standing for Election and Bad Ways. And deciding six months before an Election to make people spend two more years of their lives working, and giving them two fewer years of retirement, is most definitely not one of the Good Ways. It’s one of the Bad Ways.
But the alternative – letting the pension pot dry up over the next 20 years meaning a huge spike in contributions in the mid-2030’s isn’t exactly one of the Good Ways either.
So, what to do? If the Right Thing is the Hard Thing, and the only Other Thing doesn’t make any Sense At All, what’s a politician to do?
If your answer was ‘try desperately to get out of answering the question cos you’re basically gutless and you’ve forgotten that your job’s about making decisions – and instead pretend that it’s someone else’s problem’ – then bingo my friend, you’ve absolutely nailed it. Well done you.
But what to pin it on? How to explain this sudden abandonment of responsibility?
And here, here ladies and gentlemen, was the stroke of genius…
‘We haven’t consulted,’ came the cry.
‘We can’t possibly put up the retirement age, because we haven’t consulted. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong, but we can’t do it. We don’t even have to say whether it’s smart or not.
‘We’ve got to find out what people think first.’
To all of this, there is a rather obvious response.
Never mind that, what about you? What do you think? Given that you’re being paid more than £45,000 a year to think about these things and make decisions – seeing as you actually asked for the job, what do you think we should do about it? What, in fact, is the point of having you there at all if you’re going to try to get out of the job that you’re meant to be doing?
The fact that 19 States Members tried to sidestep the question by first referring the proposal back to the minister for more information, and then deciding that what they really wanted was a Scrutiny referral is pretty remarkable.
That the 19 include some who have in the past displayed deeply sceptical views about the value of consultation exercises (not without justification) generally suggests that this new-found faith in consulting the public was of the short-term and convenient variety.
It’s worth pointing out also that the grand total of all of the amendments proposed and alternatives suggested to Social Security Minister Ian Gorst’s proposal to raise the retirement age to 67 was exactly zero.
Hold on to that thought for a moment. Then ask yourself exactly what you think a wide public consultation asking ‘do you want to work for another two years?’ is going to produce.
If there were an alternative floating around, if there were other ideas, if we weren’t staring down the barrel of all of this in the here and now, it would be possible to have just a little sympathy with those who were trying to squirm out of this decision and hand it back to the voters.
Without that, it’s hard to see the attempts to dodge the debate as anything other than naked self-interest on the part of a few politicians in the run-up to an election. Their attempt to pass this whole matter back over to you because it’s not a convenient time for them to deal with it is shameful.
Putting up with that would be about as much good as shutting the dog inside, sticking a lead around your own neck and taking yourself off for a walk. And if you did that you’d just be a bit weird.
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